Percy’s brothers and sisters

Percy Honeybill 20th May 1887 – 2nd September 1918 Percy grew up in a family of boys. His parents, William and Harriet, had eleven children of whom only two, Evelyn (born 1880) and Edith May (born 1894) were girls. Percy had four older brothers, Albert, Evelyn’s twin (born 1880), Alfred (born 1882) , William A…

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Percy Honeybill 20th May 1887 – 2nd September 1918

Back in 2012 when I first visited the Vis en Artois memorial where Percy Honeybill  is remembered I applied for a copy of his birth certificate. If you look online you will find the year of his birth given in various places as 1888 or 1887. The message I received then was that no record…

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Who was Percy?

As well as finding out about Percy Honeybill’s war the other thing I wanted to know about was his family. How were we related? A chance on-line conversation with writer Donna Gagnon led to my reading a sea faring entry on her family history blog and discovering I was in the hands of another expert.…

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Percy Honeybill’s War

Once I was back home I applied myself to finding out more about Percy Honeybill and what might have happened to him. As always Jeremy Banning was an invaluable source of information. He confirmed that Percy would definitely have been in the first battalion of the Kings Own (Royal Lancaster Regiment) and would have been…

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Private Percy Honeybill 1887 – 2nd September 1918

My mother always used to say that if you came across a Honeybill anywhere in the world the chances were that we were related – Honeybill was her maiden name. It turns out she was more correct than she realised as the surname was ‘created’ by a clerk’s error in the mid eighteenth century which…

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